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Tuesday, 11 February 2014

The Daily Mail Article on Ed Miliband's Marxist Father

First posted: 3rd October, 2013

The Daily Mail, on Saturday, published an article on the
Marxist academic Ralph Miliband and what it takes to be his political
influence on his son, Ed Miliband - the leader of the Labour Party.
Predictably, Ed Miliband has responded in strong terms to this piece.

The actual Daily Mail headline was: 'The
man who hated Britain.' Edward Miliband has said that it was a
'character assassination'. That's no surprise. If his dad had been
Vlad the Impaler - or even Jimmy Saville! - he would have probably
said something similar. In fact most sons would do the same – it's
only natural.

Yes, a son shouldn't be held responsible for his father's
actions or views. So the question is whether or not Edward Miliband is
indeed carrying on the political tradition of his father.

The Daily Mail itself wrote:

"We do not maintain... that the iniquity of the fathers
should be visited on the sons. But when a son with prime ministerial
ambitions swallows his father's teachings, as the younger Miliband
appears to have done, the case is different."

The writer of the article, Geoffrey Levy, questioned whether or
not Ralph Miliband's Marxist views have influenced Ed Miliband. It's
a justifiable question considering the fact that for a long time
Edward's father was one of the most important Marxist academics and
intellectuals in the UK. (He was perhaps slightly less influential –
or at least less popular - than the Marxist historian, Eric
Hobsbawm.) Ralph Miliband also had close links to the Labour
Party and wrote about it in often critical terms (as well as saying
many dismissive things about 'capitalist' or parliamentary politics).

The Daily Mail writer, Geoffrey Levy, went into detail when
he wrote:

"[H]ow passionately [Ralph Miliband] would have approved
today of his son's sinister warning about some of the policies he
plans to follow if he ever becomes prime minister".

As you'd expect, Edward Miliband has distanced himself from his
father – or at least from his father's Marxist beliefs. He said:

"My father's strongly left-wing views are well known, as
is the fact that I have pursued a different path and I have a
different vision...”

Indeed 'Red Ed' has 'pursued a different path'. Even if one
doesn't accuse Ed Miliband of being a Marxist, he must know that
Marxists have followed all sorts of different 'paths' throughout the
20th century and beyond. There's been Trotskyism, Leninism
and Stalinism. There have also been many Marxist political
strategies: such as entryism;
the state-and party-based politics of the Communists; the violence-
and activism-based politics of the Trotskyists (e.g., the SWP); the
infiltration-of-the-Labour-Party route of Militant and many other
such groups and individuals; and now we have the
patronise-and-tap-into-the-'revolutionary-potential'-of-Muslims route
of contemporary the 'Progressives'; such as George Galloway's
Respect Party, Unite Against Fascism (UAF) and Hope Not Hate.
However, the most effective 'path', I would argue, is the Gramscian
or Frankfurt
Schoolone of 'taking over the institutions' and
carrying out the revolution from within. And what bigger
institution is there than the Labour Party?

So when Miliband laughs at the idea of him being part of a
'sinister Marxist plot', he must realise that politics has always
been full of such plots. He should also know that the history of the
Labour Party - especially in the 1980s and before - has been ridden
with specifically Marxist plots. In fact if you look into all these
political plots, none are at all sinister: they are obvious; if only
you care to look.

Not surprisingly (because most what it said is true), the
Daily Mail has refused to apologise for the story and stands
by it (it did so in an editorial).
The bone of contention, at least in Ed Miliband's eyes, is a single
passage which the Daily Mail cited. It is a quote from Ralph
Miliband in which he wrote that the English were

"perhaps the most nationalist people in the world... you
sometimes want them almost to lose [the war] to show them how things
are".

This quote is apparently from diary written when he was 17. In
response to its use by the Daily Mail, Edward Miliband said
that to 'build an entire case about him hating our country on an
adolescent diary entry is, of course, absurd'. No, Ed, what's absurd
is that you think the Daily Mail - or anyone else - would base
all it charges against Ralph Miliband on a single diary entry. If,
say, Margaret Thatcher's - or even Tony Blair's – father had
written that, no one would have made such a big deal about it. Only a
famous Marxist theorist wrote it – the father of the shadow
Prime Minister; who, some would argue, may well have similar
views.

In defence of his father, Ed Miliband said that he 'loved' Britain
and 'served in the Navy'. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there
conscription in Britain at
that time? (And what, exactly, does 'love' mean in this context?) If
there was outright conscription for all adult males, then there was a
moral and political imperative for such people to fight the
Nazis. Indeed, as a victim of the Nazis himself, Ralph Miliband would
have fought them no matter what outfit he belonged to. It just so
happened that he ended up in Britain - so he fought in the British
navy. Nonetheless, as a Marxist, he would have been fundamentally
against all forms of patriotism. Therefore Ralph Miliband didn't
fight for Britain. He fought against the Nazis and on
behalf of the international working class.

Edward Miliband also said the article was a 'smear'. Yet Marxists
- until very recently - wouldn't have thought twice of voicing such
categorical slag-offs of Britain and the British people. Nonetheless,
Ralph Miliband (just as with Leftists/Marxists today) would of
course have felt it necessary to exclude all socialist and Communist
Brits from such criticisms. But they would have only constituted a
small number of British people. And the situation is even worse
today. Contemporary Leftists (including the pseudo-patriots) still
hate most Brits and what they believe; even if they too, like Ralph
Miliband, exclude the tiny number of Brits who've escaped from 'false
consciousness' (or from 'internalising the values of the elite', as
Chomsky puts it).

Indeed, considering that Marxists and Leftists still think this
about most Brits and all patriots, it's perhaps even more likely that
they did so in Ralph Miliband's day. In fact the contemporary Labour
Party is still firmly attached to all sorts of groups - from Hope Not
Hate to UAF and to unions such as UNISON,
NUT and the NUJ
- that still think precisely in these terms.

Even internally the Labour Party has had many elements which were
Communist/Trotskyist and which therefore hated all forms of British
patriotism. This was most certainly true up until Neil Kinnock's
day (when he had a lot of bother from Militant)
and perhaps up until Tony Blair. But many would now argue that the
Trotskyists and Communists in the Labour Party are far more subtle
and wise than they used to be. They know that mouthing off about the
sins of patriotism - or 'chauvinism', 'xenophobia', or 'racism' as
they often put it - will be politically counterproductive. Indeed
because these Leftist elements in the Labour Party - and beyond - have
already 'taken over the institutions', as suggested by Antonia
Gramsci, they have no need to mouth off or demonstrate on the streets about the
evils of patriotism. Instead of mouthing off or activism on the
streets, they can do something about it in the Labour Party itself, or in the
Rights and race industries, or in the Law, or in the councils, or in the local
and national newspapers, or in the universities, or in the BBC, or even in
the churches. In fact that's precisely what Leftists or 'priogressives' have been doing
since at least the 1960s; the time when Ralph Miliband, Ed Miliband's
father, was most active.

*) Note: Some Nazis and other Jew-haters may have fixated on the
'Jewish blood' of Ralph and Ed Miliband. So it's interesting to note
that the author of the Daily Mail article (which criticised these
fellows), Geoffrey Levy, is himself Jewish. This only goes to show
that when it comes to Jewish people, the only safe generalisation you can
make is that it's very hard to generalise about them.

"The
Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most
nationalist people in the world...When you hear the English talk of
this war you sometimes almost want them to lose it to show them how
things are. … This slogan is taken for granted by the English
people as a whole. To lose their empire would be the worst possible
humiliation."

“The
history of reform under capitalism shows it to have been a very
partial response to specific ‘problems’, and to have remained
constrained by the logic of capital. Far from seeking to achieve
radical cures, conservative governments have viewed reform as a means
of preventing radical transformation from occurring by buying social
peace with concessions.” - Ralph Miliband

The Labour Party, on the whole, isn't a Marxist or a communist party. However, there are very many cross-currents and interactions between the Labour Party and the Trotskyist/communist Left, mainly on the periphery but also deeper within.

As for the Fabian Society, it isn't a “revolutionary" (as in violent revolution) organisation but it is still, nonetheless, uniquely dangerous and elitist. Its approach to "radically changing society" is very similar to that taken by the followers of the Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci.